Relationships

“How does one hookup? No strings attached. Is it different for different genders? Im a girl and she’s a girl. I’m newly in an open relationship and I’ve literally never just hooked up with anyone ever and I’m curious about it; but have absolutely no idea how people do it?! With complete strangers, too. I feel like Jess from New Girl with her fancy underwear and weird voice characters… Eep!”

Gaby Dunn Says:

FIRST THINGS FIRST: you absolutely do not have to be casually hooking up if you don’t want to — even if you’re in an open relationship.

Is what you’re feeling the usual discomfort that comes from trying a new thing, or is this discomfort based in pressure to do something you’re not wired for? Being in an open relationship is about options and about honesty. It’s not about sexing everyone all the time, whether or not you’re into it. If you’re the type for whom sex and feelings are intertwined, don’t hurt yourself in some misguided attempt at being “cool.” Every “sexpert” I know is a nerd and a half. No one is cool.

Assuming you’re into the hook up, let me spin you a story: When I suddenly found myself single a couple years ago, I hit up anyone who’d ever seemed down to clown to ask, “‘Sup?”

These were friends I was interested in turning into one night stands, and then continuing the friendship. Whenever I texted a cis male buddy, he was at my place within the hour. The female friends took a little more schmoozing—an invitation to drinks before the hook up. (Which is great! They’re my friends first! It’s not a punishment to hang out before doing it.)

With friends you want to bone but don’t want to date, you have to make it VERY CLEAR that this is one-and-done, and you have to be telling the truth about staying friends. That doesn’t mean hanging out hoping it happens again or bailing entirely on the friendship post-bang. It means hanging out. As friends. And if someone flips this on you, you’re well within your rights to call them out or stop being friends. Choose these people carefully!

With total strangers, you have to be honest about your gut instincts. If something feels weird or sketchy, it probably is! Prioritize your safety and happiness over seeming “chill” or “polite” to a stranger you met on OKCupid, Bumble, or Craigslist. If you get even one bad vibe pre-meet up, don’t go. If you feel a little scared entering their home, don’t go in. You know deep down when you feel safe.

The movies make anonymous sex look spontaneous and sometimes, it can be. But it also requires protecting yourself. Always let a friend or a roommate know the address you’re going to, and a time when you’ll check in via text. If you don’t check in by that time, they should call the police. If someone is coming to your place, get them on the phone and voice verify that it is them and not someone who sounds completely different (for instance, that it’s a 25-year-old woman and not a 58-year-old man). If you can meet in a well-lit public place like a coffee shop beforehand, that’s even better. That way if you change your mind, you can ask for help. Do not get into someone’s car. If there’s nowhere for you guys to hook up, tough nuggies. Do you want to end up on the sex offenders registry or get driven to the desert and dumped? (None of this sounds very sexy, but better alive than sexy.)

A safer middle ground for sex with strangers is going to sex parties. Register for a Fetlife account and search “events.“ Check if the party is 18+ or 21+ so you don’t go and get turned away. Usually the parties have different hooks so make sure you find one that fits your desires. They’re completely anonymous. (I’ve never given out my last name and some people use fake first names too.)

The question I get a lot about sex parties is if you have to hook up. You never HAVE TO do anything in a sexual situation. Especially at these places. You can go solely to watch. You can only touch women and tell men “no thank you.” (At some parties, men can watch even if you tell them no touching, but showing off can be hot!) You can leave after 5 minutes. (Women usually get in free. Straight couples pay. Single men pay more.) The ones I’ve been to have more of a consent clause than a regular bar: any guy seen as bothering a woman is reprimanded and/or thrown out pretty swiftly. (They don’t want YOU to leave so they’d rather he go. Women, in my experience, have all the power.)

There are also less intense “sex” parties like the female-only Skirt Club, which hosts orgies, but also gentle meet-and-greet cocktail hours where women interested in casual sex with other women can drink, exchange numbers, and have a low pressure flirty time.

You can also take some friends and go out to a bar, drink VERY responsibly or not at all, and do a flirt with strangers just to get the hang of it. You can even partake in some making out in the safe space of the bar and you never have to go home with anyone. (Scandalous!)

If you’ve never done any casual anything before, you can start extra slow and meet an anonymous sexting buddy on an app like Tinder or Her. Some people don’t want to meet in person, and are happy to keep your sexy-times digital. This relieves any worry about catching feelings and/or putting yourself in harm’s way for a slap and a finger-bang. For this I recommend exchanging Snapchats, which can be anonymous and tells you if someone has screenshotted you. (If they do it without asking, SHUT IT DOWN.)

I hope this was helpful and also a little bit salacious! And if you find a stranger or a friend to hook up with, I even made you this sexy playlist called “GET YOUR FREAK ON.” Take care of yourself out there, soldier! Safety first!

Gaby Dunn is a writer, comedian, YouTuber, and author living in Los Angeles. She is the host of the Bad with Money podcast and author of NY Times Best Selling novel I Hate Everyone But You. The Bad with Money book comes out from Simon & Schuster in Fall 2018!

“I’m in high school, and I went through a really messy, miserable breakup last school year. For the rest of the year, I would get anxious every time I saw my ex and tried to avoid her at all costs. Now I haven’t seen her in two months because of summer and I’ve been doing a lot better, but I’m afraid of how I’ll react when I see her again/if she tries to talk to me or if we end up in a class together. Help?”

- Question submitted by Anonymous

Brittany Ashley Says:

We’ve all gone through it. Trying to avoid seeing an ex-girlfriend is like the world’s worst video game that we’re all stuck playing for the rest of our lives. To take extra precautions, we’ll deny ourselves going to that party (5 points!) or cut off seeing certain friends (Bonus level!), just in hopes of avoiding one particular human being who seems to have the cheat codes to our anxiety.

Let’s start by saying this: throughout the summer, there’s no doubt that you’ve made progress. You started to feel like yourself again and finally like she’s not the only radio station playing in your head. Seeing her again doesn’t get to erase any of the work you’ve done. She doesn’t get to have that—that was work that you did! It’s yours! You own the rights to it!

I get that you think seeing her again might throw a wrench in your betterment. The best (but also worst) thing about being a fleshy mortal in this situation is that you simply can’t control the outcome of every awkward interaction or every student’s class schedule. Well, wait. Actually, if you learned how to hack into your school’s database, you could probably engineer the perfect schedule to where you two wouldn’t be likely to cross paths. Obviously you’d have to come up with an algorithm that also prevents hallway run-ins–maybe setting up roadblocks that block the flow of students. But even so—learning hacking as a trade feels like an enormous amount of effort just for this.

So focus on what you can control, like how much time you spend dwelling on the what if’s or how much space you let those negative feelings take up in your mind in places where good stuff could go instead. Remember good stuff? Good stuff is nice.

Once you relinquish the idea of control, the next thing you can do is build up your foundation. By that I mean: think of your self-esteem like a house. How banal, I know! But you don’t have to take an architecture class to understand how spot on my metaphor is. It’s easy to feel better momentarily when you paint the walls a bright new color or hang up a cool new Buffy poster. Who wouldn’t? Aesthetic improvements feel nice but they’re momentary. Why? Because if your foundation is cracked, the way the house looks doesn’t really matter because you have to rebuild that goddamn thing. The good news is that whether or not your house feels like an abandoned roadside shack or an immaculate mansion a la MTV Cribs (too old a reference?), remember that you can always build up your foundation.

So how can you build up this foundation, you ask? Well, emotional health should be tended to at all times, not just when you’re in dire need of it. If you continuously appreciate yourself and the people around you, you’ll build a strong ass foundation that won’t crack easily.

Think about what makes you feel warm and good. Maybe that’s simply being outside. Listen, you don’t have to go base jumping or extreme whitewater rafting, but sometimes it means just taking a book in your backyard or sitting on a swing.

Too much like an indie movie? Fine. Then go do something nice for your friends like writing them a handwritten card or making them a mixtape (Am I out of touch?). Strengthening your friendships and telling people how much you care about them is by far the coolest thing on the planet. Trust me. They won’t forget it.

Walk through the halls confidently with your headphones in while you listen to music. I like to daydream and picture myself as the lead singer, but that’s just me. Maybe you can even jam out to this playlist I crafted for you:

But most importantly: Give yourself a break. It’s okay to not fully be over the messy feelings that ensued, that just means you’re human. If we could think our way out of heartache, we’d all be robots.

Eventually, you’ll be so distracted simply basking in your own incredible atmosphere, that you’ll forget that you ever cared what you’d think if you ran into her. I know it sounds kind of silly: Distract yourself with yourself. t’s the best advice I can give and has gotten me through many versions and variations of “fear of running into my ex at school.”

Hello! We are starting a new advice series here at Everyone Is Gay called “An Honest Mixtape”! Each month (starting right now!) we will feature a new guest writer who will tackle one of your advice questions with words *and* music!

Huge thanks to writer, comedian, and actor Brittany Ashley for kicking things off for us!

"Hi Everyone! So I'm in a kinda awkward situation... I've been dating this lady for 7-ish months and spend a lot of time at her place. I recently found a few old mementos from her past lovers - love notes, journals, cards, gifts, etc. I'm finding it hard to not feel jealous (especially cuz I'm not as experienced as her when it comes to relationships, and I trash everything after the relationship is over)... What do you suggest we do? Do I have the right to feel upset and jealous about this?"

- Question submitted by Anonymous

Kristin Says:

Happy 7-months-ish relationship, Anonymous! I would like to begin by telling you that my first-ever girlfriend kept a journal for me during the summer that we fell in love. She wrote in it nearly every day, detailing so many of the moments we spent together, and at the end of the summer she gave it to me to keep. It was one of the most incredible gifts of all time… and it was given to me twenty years ago. I use those italics because holy shit how did I do *anything* twenty years ago, but also to underline this point: I am now married to an entirely different person and I still keep that journal in my house. It is a memento – exactly the word you used to describe the items in your question! – and a very powerful memento of a very important time in my life that I spent with another person who I loved dearly.

Keeping mementos of past loves, in my opinion, is a very normal (and vital!!) part of our lives. We are people, after all, so we don’t remember much of life’s detail as weeks, months, and years pass us by. When we share something important with another person, we grow. The people that we love and have loved are very big parts of who we are. So, your girlfriend holding on to milestones in her life does not mean that she is still in that place today – it simply means that the place she was once in was very important, and she wants to be able to remember certain pieces of it.

Do you have a right to feel upset and jealous?? Of course you do! We all have rights to feel our damn feelings, and finding those mementos stirred up a lot of feelings inside of you – you are jealous and upset, and you also explained that some of these feelings might come from the fact that this is one of your very first relationships. So, you are probably thinking things like, “If she has these things it must mean she wants to be with those other people still!!” (to which I would say no it most certainly does not and please reference my memento-discussion above), or “I am probably not going to be as good of a girlfriend as those other people were!!” (to which I would say: you most certainly *are* going to be a wonderful girlfriend, but you will not be the same as they were, nor should you wish to be – she is with you because you are different!).

My words probably won’t make all of those feelings go away, and I would encourage you to talk to your girlfriend about those feelings – but not in a way that makes her feel she has done something wrong. She hasn’t! You aren’t doing anything wrong by feeling these things either, but you should look to her to help you through those feelings. She might be able to explain to you why she keeps the things she keeps, or she might be able to just say to you, “Hey. I care about you right now, and that is what I want to focus on. I can remember things from my past fondly and not want them back – and I would love it if you could work to trust my feelings for you.”

Whatever you do, don’t ask her to get rid of those memories. Often, in love, the tighter we try to hold someone, the more they wriggle away. The most powerful way to love a person is to let them be who they are right now while also loving the person that they once were (and all that that entails) and the person they are becoming as each and every day goes by.

"I moved to a new city in the Fall and started dating a lady. This is my first romantic/queer relationship! She is much older than me. l I met her entire family for the holidays after 1 month of dating! She wanted me to define "us" shortly after and texts me/wants to see me everyday. I've told her I needed space but she'd bombard me with texts like "You don't care, why are you with me, you're too young, I'm just your entertainment, etc." She also yells a lot. It stresses me out! What should I do?"

Question submitted by Anonymous

Kristin Says:

This is not a healthy relationship and this is not an appropriate or respectful way to treat someone, END OF STORY.

Since this is your first queer/romantic relationship, I need you to know something important: There are oh-so-many humans out there who will NOT yell at you all the time, who will be able to hear you when you express YOUR needs, and who will have the ability to treat you the way you deserve to be treated. This person you are dating is obviously struggling with some deep-seated insecurities surrounding commitment – which is understandable and even surmountable with time and work, but something that she needs to work on without dragging you through it and disrespecting you during the process.

In my opinion, you should do one of two things:

1. Break up with her. I truthfully think that, given what you’ve said here, this person is not going to be able to hear what you need enough to work on themselves while in a relationship. Explain that you are not in the same place, and that it would not be good for either of you to continue further. If she will not let this drop and the situation escalates, leave the conversation. If necessary, block her phone, block her socials. Make it a clean break – this situation desperately calls for that kind of action.

2. Explain yourself and try one more time. If you think that I’ve read this too harshly and you want to try a longer-arc approach, make plans to have dinner in a public place. At dinner, explain to her that you are not ready for the level of commitment she is after, and that you need for things to either slow down considerably, or for things to end. If she yells at you, tells you that you are wrong, or implies in any way that you cannot both need space and also care about her, that is when you end things and refer to suggestion #1. If she listens to you and is willing to work & step back a bit, etc, then you can give it a shot… but BE VIGILANT. Giving you space means she is actually going to give you space, not just say she will give you space and then berate you any time you actually take it.

Listen. Relationships of any kind, regardless of age, age difference, or anything else, require respect and communication. What you are saying here can be pared down to: My girlfriend does not listen to how I feel, does not consider what I need, and does not respect me as a person. That is all I ever need to hear to say: end it. You deserve better.